March 2011
| Volume 68 | Number 6
What Students Need to Learn
Marge Scherer
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Lynne Munson
The nonprofit organization Common Core looked at curriculums, standards, and assessments in nine nations that consistently outrank the United States on the Programme for International Assessment (PISA) to see whether differences in countries' PISA scores are due to differences in the content they teach. Findings revealed that top-performing nations share a dedication to providing their students with a comprehensive education across the liberal arts and sciences whereas U.S. students spend countless hours preparing to take tests of their basic reading and math skills. The author concludes that no nation that scores competitively on the PISA exam puts skills before content or focuses chiefly on reading and math. The United States should make a point of learning from the education practices of high-performing nations.
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David T. Conley
The Common Core State Standards, released in June 2010, offer an opportunity to shift education away from shallow, test-prep instruction and toward a focus on key cognitive skills, writes Conley. Two consortia of states are now developing common assessments to measure these standards—assessments that will be designed to capture deeper, more complex learning than current state tests do. Conley describes the cognitive skills that students need for college and career success (problem formulation, research, interpretation, communication, and precision and accuracy) and asserts that the Common Core State Standards are written in a way that promotes these skills. Educators now need to follow up by keeping the skills in mind as they develop curriculum and instruction to teach to the standards.
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David J. Ferrero
Schools have traditionally had the goal of helping students grow in three areas: personal, economic, and civic. In recent years, however, the economic realm has taken precedence, with careers and credentials becoming a focus of education policy. In this article, Ferrero bewails the lack of support for the more personal and civic aims of education and suggests that a strong education in the humanities can bring these forgotten values to the forefront without depriving students of the important economic benefits of education.
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Grant Wiggins
High school is boring, writes the author, in part because lock-step diploma requirements crowd out personalized and engaged learning. It is also boring because current content standards are based on traditional, subject-area notions of curriculum instead of on the essential question, What do students need to be well prepared for their adult lives? Wiggins gives a historical look at attempts to standardize the high school curriculum, from Herbert Spencer in 1859 to the Committee of Ten in 1892 to the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education in the early 1900s. Today's state and national standards, he writes, are developed by committees of people who "merely rearrange the furniture of the traditional core content areas; they replicate the past that they feel comfortable with." He advocates engaging in a national conversation about the mission of schooling to develop standards that are "forward-looking, client-centered, and flexible."
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Robert J. Sternberg
Translating ethics knowledge into ethical behavior is much harder than it appears, writes Sternberg. In this article, he outlines an eight-step process that individuals must go through to act in an ethical way—for example, recognizing that there is an event to which to react, taking personal responsibility for generating an ethical solution to the problem, and preparing for possible repercussions of having acted. He advocates that schools teach students this process—not in a separate ethics course, but by infusing critical conversations throughout the curriculum.
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Richard L. Allington
Despite the fact that two of every three students in U.S. schools have reading proficiencies below the level needed to adequately do grade-level work, schools don't make a point of offering either high-quality professional development for kindergarten teachers nor expert tutorial instruction for at-risk kindergartners. This means that most schools will deliberately create a pool of students who will become their struggling readers. Schools typically focus on three approaches that don't work: using paraprofessionals to help struggling readers, using computer-based instructional programs, and using core reading programs. To effectively support young struggling readers, schools need to screen kindergarteners on day one and provide additional high-quality reading instruction to those in need of it, continue to offer supports in 1st grade, and engage students in high-success reading.
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Barry Gilmore
Although adult readers may savor the chance to choose from a wide range of things to read, experiment with different genres, and discover exciting books on their own, high school students' reading choices in school are generally narrowed to a few standard classic novels, Gilmore argues. The list of recommended "good" books that most high schools require has changed little since 1928. This limits students' ability to read critically, learn about both high- and low-quality writing in various genres, and compare texts. It likely contributes to the fact that young adults read less for pleasure than people of other age groups; adolescents get the message in school that only a narrow range of texts are worthy of reading and discussing. While acknowledging the value of the traditional canon, Gilmore argues for giving secondary students greater choice in what kinds of books they read in school. He provides both examples of how several schools do give students more leeway to choose their in-school reading and suggestions for how teachers can make reading choice work in the constraints of typical language arts classes, including linking texts to academic disciplines to encourage reading in the content areas.
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Diana Senechal
When the teaching of strategies for understanding literature crowds out a close reading of literary works themselves, something is amiss in language arts instruction, and students lose out. This has become the case in too many elementary and even secondary classrooms today, Senechal believes. Using a strategy-based lesson proposed by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis, Senechal illustrates how formulaic strategies can lead to lessons that sloppily interpret books and overwhelm the joy of reading with elaborate jargon. Equally egregious, the approach leads to students selecting most of their own in-school reading rather than studying a curriculum of deliberately selected, high-quality books that will enrich their lives. With Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "To Any Reader" as an example, Senechal shows how a lesson might focus closely on a work of literature itself, and how this close study might bring surprises. She gives suggestions for working literature-focused instruction into language arts programs.
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Gary Hoachlander and Dave Yanofsky
In too many schools, science and mathematics are taught separately with little or no attention to technology and engineering. Also, science and mathematics tend to function in isolation from other core subjects. In California, Linked Learning: Pathways to College and Career Success connects core academics to challenging professional and technical education in such fields as engineering, biomedical and health sciences, energy, information technology, and agriculture and natural resources. Creating strong pathways depends on four elements: developing an integrated curriculum organized around a theme, changing instructional practice, designing work-based learning opportunities, and pursuing continuous improvement.
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Connie M. Moss, Susan M. Brookhart and Beverly A. Long
No matter what we decide students need to learn, not much will happen until students understand what they are supposed to learn during a lesson and set their sights on learning it. Crafting learning targets for each lesson and deliberately sharing them with students is one way to give students the direction they need. Targets that tell students what they need to learn, how well they need to learn it, and how they will demonstrate that learning give lessons purpose. In this article, the authors discuss the importance of learning targets and offer ideas to help teachers integrate learning targets into their lessons.
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W. Stephen Wilson
As a result of his review of 52 sets of K–12 mathematics standards—for the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the Common Core State Standards Initiative—the author finds that the majority of U.S. states fail to focus on the mathematics that elementary school children need to learn to be successful in college math. Arithmetic is the needed foundation—and that foundation is taught in elementary school. The Common Core State Standards in mathematics do a better job than most state standards because they emphasize the importance of arithmetic.
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Young Imm Kang Song
Like teachers in many countries with a national curriculum and standardized testing, South Korean teachers find it challenging to include in their curriculums knowledge students will need in the future that doesn't fall within the purview of tested areas. The arts education, character education, environmental education, geography, and education for citizenship are among subjects likely to get short shrift. According to the author, South Korean teachers use interdisciplinary methods to teach essential concepts and skills that fall outside the reach of the core academic subjects. Song describes a series of lessons carried out by a 2nd grade teacher in Gwangju, South Korea that helped students connect to their local neighborhood, including through visiting a residence for elderly women who can't live with their blood families called Sungsim House. Through writing, group reflection, and arts projects using recycled materials to depict stories the elderly women told them, the 2nd graders synthesized what they learned about the changes in childhood over the generations and ethical behaviors consistent with Korean culture—like respecting one's elders and taking care of vulnerable people in society.
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Jane L. David
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Robert J. Marzano
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William M. Ferriter
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Thomas R. Hoerr
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Joseph A. Henderson
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David Griffith
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Camille Blachowicz and Peter Fisher
A solid body of research identifies the essential elements of effective vocabulary learning in the elementary grades. This article offers checklists of schoolwide and classroom characteristics that mark good vocabulary instruction. The authors cite research showing that such instruction includes lots of reading, writing, and meaningful talking; explicit teaching of individual words as well as word learning strategies; and development of word consciousness (awareness of and interest in words and their meanings).
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H. Michael Hartoonian, Richard D. Van Scotter and William E. White
U.S. schools need to teach students about their responsibilities as citizens because students are not apt to learn these skills on their own. Schools can do this most effectively by helping students understand the United States as a persistent debate over four sets of value tensions: law versus ethics, freedom versus equality, unity versus diversity, and private wealth versus common wealth. Students would take a much greater interest in both U.S. history and civics if they understood that they were developing essential skills for perpetuating their representative democracy and if they understood the United States as an enduring debate over these four sets of value tensions.
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Maria Grant and Diane Lapp
What does it mean to be critically literate in science? Simply to have the ability to read, write, think, talk, and make decisions about real-world science issues. Promoting critical literacy—and encouraging secondary-level students to connect the science content they learn with controversial, thorny issues that directly affect their lives—is part of making young people scientifically literate. As educators who write about literacy and science instruction, Grant and Lapp propose four actions to promote critical literacy in science classrooms: (1) identify science topics of interest; (2) guide students to read relevant sources broadly; (3) teach students to read like scientists; and (4) guide learners to evaluate data.
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Wayne Journell
The author, a social studies educator, asserts that learning the values of ideological tolerance and civil deliberation is just as essential as learning academic content. He describes his study of three schools during the 2008 presidential elections, in which he found that political intolerance was often ignored by teachers and even perpetuated by the school environment. To teach students the skill of civil deliberation, he writes, teachers must provide opportunities for discussion in ideological diverse settings as well as model respectful discussion themselves.
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Bonnie B. Rushlow
A good visual arts program is often at the hub of a top-notch school—and there's a reason for that, Rushlow maintains. Top-quality art education delivers three main benefits. It teaches skills that students need to thrive in the 21st century, promotes student engagement, and strengthens literacy. Arts programs must be adequately resourced, taught by highly-qualified teachers, and supported by firmly committed administrators to yield these benefits, however. Rushlow describes how, for many learners, project-based learning in the visual arts strengthens skills that traditional academics—particularly if taught in a test-prep format—may not, such as creative thinking, problem solving, and flexibility. She gives concrete suggestions for how administrators can promote high-quality visual arts instruction.
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Teresa Preston
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http://groups.ascd.org/groups/detail/121798/educational-leadership/
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